Heavy Metal Reviews
Heavy metal in all its varieties, and from all eras, is the bread and butter of Kevy Metal, if the name of the site had not given this away yet. All Album of the Week reviews about heavy metal albums published on Kevy Metal can be found right here.
Since I didn’t start properly tagging my reviews until a couple of years in, these aren’t all the heavy metal reviews I have done over the years. If you are looking for something specific, you can always search by band name or release title using the search bar at the bottom of the page.
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Album of the Week 31-2023: Luzbel – Pasaporte al Infierno
Despite being titled ‘Metal Caido del Cielo’, Luzbel’s debut EP showed a band that wasn’t sure yet whether they were a hard rock or a heavy metal band. Their first full-length – though being just barely half an hour long – ‘Pasaporte al Infierno’ is unequivocally an early heavy metal…
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Album of the Week 30-2023: Medina Azahara – Sin Tiempo
Medina Azahara is one of the pioneers of the Andalusian rock scene, which combines elements of rock and Andalusian folk music. Initially, the type of rock in Medina Azahara’s cocktail was progressive rock heavily inspired by early Genesis. But with the arrival of guitarist Francisco ‘Paco’ Ventura in the late…
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Album of the Week 29-2023: Halford – Resurrection
At the time when Halford’s debut album ‘Resurrection’ was released, it was frequently compared to ‘Accident at Birth’ by Bruce Dickinson, who had recently re-joined Iron Maiden. Both albums featured a return to heavy metal – with a somewhat modern bite – by iconic singers after a couple of years…
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Album of the Week 28-2023: ArkRoyal – Clymenus
ArkRoyal is a band that does things a little differently. Even superficially; the fact that their singer Illumina also plays guitar is quite an anomaly by Japanese rock standards, to the point where I might have thought it actually was illegal to do so for all-female bands – or visual…
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Album of the Week 27-2023: Agora – Empire
When bands who don’t traditionally sing in English release English-language material, there is always a risk involved, especially vocally. Singers may sound wildly different in another language or simply not feel as comfortable not singing in their native tongue. Also, the interaction between the music and the vocals may not…
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Album of the Week 26-2023: Stravaganzza – Sentimientos
The symphonic metal landscape has the potential to be so much more than it actually is. Somehow, the bigger bands end up doing similar things: sacrificing complexity in the songwriting for more bombastic arrangements, the female vocals are clean and operatic, the male vocals are growled or screamed. Spain’s Stravaganzza…
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Album of the Week 25-2023: Jenner – To Live is to Suffer
It always makes me extremely happy to hear young bands who realize there is more to thrash metal than just speed and aggression. There just aren’t all that many who do. Serbia’s Jenner fortunately does and already manages to impress greatly on their debut album ‘To Live is to Suffer’.…
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Album of the Week 24-2023: Leather – We Are the Chosen
Human voices change with age. That is unavoidable. Singers adapt their voices or their parts to it, but in a full-force singing genre like heavy metal, there is often some loss of power. And singers with a bit of grit somehow tend to be the first to deteriorate. Not Leather…
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Album of the Week 23-2023: Mari Hamada – Soar
‘Soar’ is the most consistent Mari Hamada album in decades. While it features a similar elegant, bombastic power metal light style as her previous couple of albums, the songwriting is just better across the board, making ‘Soar’ a very entertaining listen throughout its entire runtime rather than just a couple…
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